Posts Tagged ‘clusty’
November 23rd, 2009
The reason that the vast majority of people use Google as their preferred Search Engine over others (e.g. Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Clusty, Wolfram Alpha etc.) is because Google does search best. Google has such huge Search Engine market share because it returns more relevant results to searchers and is constantly improving. Google does well because it listens to end-users then provides what the end-users want.
It is therefore extremely disappointing that Microsoft is (apparently) paying News Corp. to exclude its content from the Google Search Results. News Corp. media is reporting that ‘News Corp, Microsoft want to lock Google out’. This is very negative for consumers because Microsoft is not trying to compete with Google through providing a better product but is rather trying to attract users to Bing (Microsoft’s Search Engine) through manipulating where data appears. This effectively means that Microsoft is trying to force competitors to provide an inferior product instead of itself providing a better product i.e. it is trying to lower the standard for everyone.
Microsoft must be very concerned about Google at present. Microsoft’s major revenue and profit earners are the Office suite and the Windows Operating System. Google is gaining market share rapidly with Google Docs and Gmail (Google is taking market share from Microsoft Office including Outlook and Exchange) and the yet to be released Google Chrome OS is set to be a very big headache for Microsoft.
It is just so disappointing if, as reported by News Corp., Microsoft is engaging such negative competitive practices. Microsoft is sure to alienate many loyal followers through such negativity. Perhaps Microsoft should rather focus on the end-user rather than competitors. Google is doing very well by concentrating on end-users wants and needs.
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Tags: bing, Caffeine, chrome, clusty, gmail, google, google docs, Internet, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, news corp, Office, Outlook, windows, wolfram alpha, yahoo | 
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May 21st, 2009
Microsoft will soon be launching its next attempt in trying to capture a greater share of the search market. There has been a lot of news lately in relation to the various search engines; last week saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the week before was the news of Google starting to index ‘Rich Snippets’ (Microformats and RDFa data).
Microsoft has been testing Kumo Read the rest of this entry »
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February 19th, 2009
Most people use a single search engine for a high proportion of their searches. People occasionally use other search engines when they are unable to find appropriate results using their primary search engine. The most popular search engines are Google, Live and Yahoo. This article recommends that people divorce from interchanging between these search engines and employ a search strategy of using Clusty in addition to one of these search engines.
Google, Live and Yahoo Search are Similar
The trio of Google, Live and Yahoo all present their results in an ordered list. Each prioritises and returns results based on mathematical algorithms. The results returned from these very popular search engines look very similar even although the content and order of the results differ. As an example, I searched each of the three search engines for my name; Gary Eckstein. Google returned 346,000 results, Yahoo 1,220,000 results and Live 278,000 results. The first page of results returned was different for each search engine. I am a huge fan of Google and think that their search results are superior to both Yahoo and Live. The problem however still arises that a few hundred thousand results have been returned and Google is guessing which ones I’ll find most relevant by displaying them in an ordered but very long list. This is where Clusty comes ‘into its own’.
What is Clusty
Clusty is a search engine with a difference; Clusty returns search results in ‘clusters’ (categories). Once the search term is entered and submitted, Clusty searches Gigablast, Live, the Open Directory, Ask and other search engines and 
returns the results. In addition, the results are clustered (categorised) to the left of the screen (see the image to the right for an example). When one clicks on one of the Clusters, the results relating to that cluster alone are returned. This Clustering is incredibly powerful in narrowing the few hundred thousand results retuned. As an example I was recently searching for ITIL Availability Management process documentation. Searching in Google, Live and Yahoo returned millions of pages and I could not locate actual process documentation after an hour of searching. Searching on Clusty with the same terms and narrowing the results by Cluster gave me the required results in less than a minute.
Conclusion
As mentioned before, I am a huge fan of Google especially when searching for things like movie showing times. Google falls short when there are millions of Internet pages with very similar terms in them and this is where Clusty becomes very valuable. It takes a bit of time to understand where the strengths and weaknesses of Clusty, Google and the other search engines live but I strongly recommend trying out Clusty in addition to using your usual favourite search engine.